I recently extracted some data from the Drupal project's CVS and Git logs to see how the number of code contributors and total contributions have changed over time. If there was any doubt of our continual growth, the resulting charts demolish it.
Aggregated results from core and contributed modules.
Aggregated results from core and contributed modules.
As can be seen from the graphs, there is a pretty big spike in commit activity post-Git migration.
The following blog post was published as a guest blog post on Forbes.com. I wrote it after Al Jazeera successfully moved some of their Drupal sites from their traditional hosting company to Acquia Hosting (now called Acquia Managed Cloud) to help them survive a 2,000% traffic increase as a result of the crises in the Middle East. The blog post provides real proof of how the Cloud helped one of the largest news organizations in the world survive one of the largest political events in the world. A fascinating story for Drupal!
Over the past decade, the Web has completely transformed how people create and consume information. We have all witnessed firsthand how the free flow of information is impacting the way individuals and companies communicate and how the rules of governance are changing for entire nations. Now, we’re all participating and reporting on events as they happen, and from where they happen.
There is no better example of that than the most recent events in the Middle East. And one organization, Al Jazeera, the world’s largest news organization solely focused on the Middle East, was right in the middle of the incredible broadcast and social media storm that instantly developed. Throughout the ordeal, Al Jazeera effectively leveraged the power of the cloud to stay on the air and scale its reach and performance. If events of the past few months are any indication, there are lessons here for other content-driven companies to consider for their own online operations.
Al Jazeera’s English operations broadcasts news and current affairs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with more than 1,000 staff members from more than 50 nations. Quite literally, Al Jazeera provides the world with a front seat on the Middle East stage. It broadcasts from centers in Doha, the capital city of the state of Qatar, Kuala Lumpur, London and Washington.
Al Jazeera’s live blog site is powered by Drupal, a free, open source social publishing platform that enables content-driven organizations to publish content and build communities quickly and easily. Drupal is used by many of the world’s most prominent organizations including the White House, the World Economic Forum, Intel, The Economist and Turner Broadcasting.
Al Jazeera’s English live blog site was a vital source for breaking news in Egypt. Bloggers were posting updates from the epicenter of the crisis and social media was often the only means of communication both inside and outside of the country. During the crisis, traffic to the Al Jazeera web site increased 1,000% and traffic to the live blog spiked 2,000%. This dilemma, normally a good one for news organizations, caused unpredictable performance and excessive page load times for site visitors.
From an infrastructure standpoint, Al Jazeera had historically hosted its blog with a traditional provider but had increasingly suffered a variety of scalability issues brought on by surging demand – unacceptable for Al Jazeera or any similar content business. What might have been just a typical technical nuisance on a mundane news day quickly became unsustainable when Egypt erupted.
Al Jazeera faced a mission-critical problem that needed a real-time solution. Where could it find performance hosting and support immediately and within a reasonable cost? Would it be secure and private? What about reliable? The answer: The cloud, the various data access, storage and hosting services available remotely over the Internet. Much discussed but often not fully appreciated by the business community, cloud services enable custom sites to perform well under varying, and sometimes severe, traffic conditions. Moving to a Drupal-supported cloud option allowed Al Jazeera to scale up quickly, dynamically render their content faster, and achieve a higher level of site reliability – issues that previously overwhelmed its physical hardware environments.
By leveraging Drupal and turning to the cloud, the Al Jazeera technical team demonstrated how to rapidly turn a seemingly disastrous situation into a net positive business decision going forward. Fast forward a few weeks, and the demands on Al Jazeera’s Web infrastructure have only increased with new crises across the region. The difference is the organization is now able to better handle these unforeseen demands and focus on the core business, reporting the news as it happens.
I recently had the pleasure of serving as a thesis advisor on a work by Marc Seeger, who was completing a portion of his requirements for a Master of Science in Computer Science and Media at Stuttgart Media University. Marc's thesis was titled "Building blocks of a scalable web crawler".
Marc undertook a project for Acquia that I had originally started in 2006; a Drupal site crawler to catalog, as best as possible, the current distribution of Drupal sites across the web. That is a task for which there is no easy answer as Drupal can be downloaded and used free (in all senses of the word). The best way to find out how many Drupal sites exist, is to develop a crawler that crawls the entire web and that counts all the Drupal sites one by one.
With Marc's help, I was able to resurrect my crawler project. Marc spent 6 months working with me; 3 months were spent in Germany where Marc lives, and 3 months were spent in Boston where Acquia is based.
During that time, Marc explored suitable architectures for building out, collecting and managing website data on the order of many millions of domains. He examined different backend storage systems (Riak, Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis, CouchDB, Tokyo Cabinet, MySQL, Postgres, ...), contemplated the methods of collecting the data while simultaneously allowing search and access. As part of his work, Marc explored a variety of different database technologies, database schemas and configurations, and experimented with various configurations of Amazon's Elastic Cloud hardware (EC2). Issues common to any large deployment were investigated and analyzed in detail, including HTTP persistent connections, data locking and concurrency control, caching, and performant solutions for large-scale searches. HTTP redirects, DNS issues -- his thesis covers it all, at least in terms of how each of these items impacted the search for an acceptable algorithm.
The crawler has been up and running for a number of months now, and investigated about 100 million domain names. Now we crawled about 100 million domain names, I plan to start publishing the results.
Marc's work is available in PDF from his blog post, and it's a good read, even if I'm slightly biased. Thanks for the great work, Marc! Time to look for a couple new thesis projects, and thesis students that want to work with me for a few months. Ideas welcome!
Typical cheatsheets tend to be over-sized documents, far too large to be viewed in its entirety on a desktop and not too handy for the super-fast reference that is needed. To get the full benefit of any cheatsheat, your only real option is to print it out and keep it close at hand. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an easier way, a quicker way. Of course there is – what good be handier than having a cheatsheet set as your desktop wallpaper? Always there for quick reference, no need to print it out and no need to scroll through an over-long document.
In this post we have rounded up a selection of cheatsheet wallpapers, in various sizes, covering various technologies, like CSS, HTML5, WordPress, Javascript and many more.
The WordPress Help Sheet Wallpaper is a simple desktop wallpaper listing Basic Template Files, PHP Snippets for the Header, PHP Snippets for the Templates, Extra Stuff for WordPress, based on the WPCandy WordPress Help Sheet.
Download: 2560x1600px.
The Drupal Cheat Sheet Desktop Wallpaper is a desktop wallpaper that features the most popular variables of the open source content management system Drupal.
Download: 1024x768px – 1280x800px – 1440x900px – 1680x1050px – 1920x1200px.
The information on this wallpaper is pretty much just a copy of what is found in the WHATWG specs, just condensed and a little bit easier to read. There are virtually no explanations, and no examples other than some graphics for compositing values. It's basically just a listing of the attributes and methods of the canvas element and the 2d drawing context.
Download: 1388x1027px.
This is the very popular CSS cheat sheet in Helvetica from styl.eti.me. Simplistic in appearance, but very useful for quick referencing. Unfortunately we can not find a working download link for this cool wallpaper, but the good news is they do have a PSD version available. So download it and resize.
Download: CSS Cheat Sheet Wallpaper in Helvetica.
Here is a TextMate wallpaper that will guide you through some of its powerful features and help you get a handle on all of the keyboard shortcuts. The PSD file is also available.
Download: 1280x800px – 1920x1200px.
Yahoo! provides a number of cheat sheets for their YUI library widgets however these are all in PDF format and not usable as wallpaper. However, here you will find all of those cheatsheets converted to PNG images of various sizes all for your desktop.
There are wallpapers available for Animation, Calendar, Connection Manager, Dom Collection, Drag & Drop Event, Utility & Custom Event Logger, Slider and TreeView. And all are available in the following desktop sizes: 1400x1050px, 1280x960px, 1165x900px and 1024x768px.
Download: Yahoo! UI (YUI) Cheat Sheets as Wallpaper.
Download: 1440x900px – 1680x1050px – 1920x1200px.
If you need a little help in getting to know Prototype a little better and some help in understanding how the code works, then this is the wallpaper for you. You have a choice of either a dark or white wallpaper, and are available in these sizes: 1280x960px and 1440x900px.
Download: 1280x960px (Dark) – 1440x900px (Dark) – 1280x960px (White) – 1440x900px (White).
Download: 1100x850px – 3300x2550px.
A Themer's Cheatsheet Wallpaper is a quick refresher of web design fundamentals directly on your desktop. It is available for download in several different colors and the original SVG has been released to the Public Domain.
Download: 1280x800px (Blue) – 1280x800px (Red) – 1280x800px (Black) – 1280x800px (Green).
Download: 1920x1200px.
Think of it as a desk reference checklist that is always at your fingertips. From pre-campaign to reporting, the basics (and more) are right here for you to put directly on your desktop.
Download: 1024x768px – 1280x960px – 1280x1024px – 1440x900px.
Download: 1024x768px – 1280x800px – 1280x1024px – 1440x900px – 1680x1050px – 1920x1200px.
The Color Theory Quick Reference Poster for Designers has all of the basics of color theory contained in one place – specifically, a cool infographic-esque poster. This way, you can quickly reference things that may have slipped to the back of your mind since design school.
Download: 1280x800px – 1440x900px – 1680x1050px – 1920x1200px.
Download: 1280x1024px (White) – 1280x1024px (Dark) – 1680x10050px (Dark) – 1280x1024px (White).
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The Best Cheat Sheets for Web Designers and Developers (From CSS, Ajax, Perl, Vbscript…) »
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20 CSS3 Tutorials and Techniques for Creating Buttons »
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Mollom blocks more than 500,000 comment spam attempts a day. That volume provides a unique perspective on the world of comment spammers, including the world's best and worst spam techniques. Below are some excerpts from some of the more interesting spam attempts which we see frequently on Mollom's back end.
1. Some spammers try to embed flash objects in the comments section of a blog post or article. Really? Yes.
2. Spammers randomly generate spam messages as illustrated by the excerpt shown below. Some comment spammers have obviously buggy scripts ...
3. Some spammers try to take advantage of other companies’ positive brand and reputation. In the example below, the spammer tries to leverage Facebook's reputation to build a positive Mollom or Akismet reputation of its own.
4. In the example below, this spammer used a free site building service, webs.com, to build a spam site. If not a free website building service, spammers will abuse incorrectly configured content management systems. Of course, there is some good old shouting too.
5. A very common spam technique is to copy relevant content from a site, and to sprinkle in some advertising. The excerpt below shows a spam message posted on a blog post that talks about Drupal.
6. As strange as it may seem, there are spammers that will simply post gibberish. My unproven theory is that they keep track of the gibberish they posted, and then register the domain after it has a reasonable ranking on Google. Spam first, create the spam pages later. This is one of the more difficult techniques to block for Mollom.
7. Then there are spammers who try to leverage image tags to inject image spam in the comments of a blog post.
8. Some will try to use OpenID to by-pass e-mail verification.
9. Another trick that spammers will try is to insert the Google ad section start. This tag is normally used by site owners to tell Google about the text and HTML content that they'd like Google to emphasize when matching ads to a site's content. Spammers try to trick Google into believing that their spam comment is the most important content on the page. Could be deadly for your search engine ranking, and could really hurt your advertising revenue. Evil!
10. Last is the simple, but somewhat clever approach of trying to trick spam filters by injecting unnecessary spacing.
Acquia has announced the availability of Acquia Drupal, a free and commercially supported distribution of the popular Drupal open source social publishing system. They also unveiled the Acquia Network, which offers subscription-based access to technical support and remote network services that simplify the development and operation of Drupal Web sites. Entry level subscriptions to the Acquia Network will be free of charge through the end of the year.
For those that aren’t overly familiar with Drupal, it’s an open source web development and content management platform that publishes, manages and organizes a wide variety of content on websites. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal.
With the release of Acquia Drupal with its streamlined packaging of Drupal and a support system via the Acquia Network, there will definitely be a tremendous increase in Drupal developers and websites powered by this Drupal.
All subscribers to the Acquia Network will gain access to the Acquia Network’s subscriber forums, remote network services such as software update notifications, uptime monitoring, Mollom spam blocking, and Acquia Drupal documentation.
What all this means is that many more companies, especially enterprise class entities, will be much more willing to dip their toes in the Drupal pool now that there’s a commercial grade package available that includes tech support. If all this sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking about Linux and how similar its path has been to the corporate world. At one point, only extreme geeks used Linux, until some big names like IBM and Novell started proving technical support plans with their Linux offerings. That allowed larger companies to try Linux much the same way they will try Drupal thanks to the Acquia partnership and support offering.
It seems like the natural evolutionary progression for all open source projects to go from a handful of geek’s using it in their basement to the corporate enterprise once a commercial package with tech support is distributed. It will be interesting to see what kind of websites and social networks are born from this marriage between Acquia and Drupal.
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This post covers essential resources related to Drupal — the basics, modules, Drupal design inspiration, Drupal themes, tutorials, starter themes, blog editors and Drupal-projects.
